Exploring Dalit Experiences in Colonial and Post-Colonial India

Contents: Preface. 1. Complexities of the Dalit Movement in India. 2. Gandhi and Varnashramadharma – A Pursuit in Harmony. 3. Gandhi, Akalis and the Vaikom Satyagraha: The Beginning of an Unhappy Saga. 4. Caste, Migration and Overseas Settlement Patterns: The Experience of the Tamil ‘Outcastes’ in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. 5. Investigating the Paraiyans’ Right Over ‘Waste’: The Tussle Between The Reformist And Conservative Bureaucracy In Late Nineteenth Century Tamil Nadu. 6. Dalit Politics in Tamil Nadu. 7. Congress, Gandhi and the Politics of Untouchability in Tamil Nadu in the 1930s. 8. Exploring the Lost Vision of Dravidanadu: Political Rivalry and the Crisis of Adi Dravida Politics in Tamil Nadu, 1947-1956. 9. The Emancipation of the Pulays in Nineteenth Century Kerala. 10. Dalit and Watershed Programmes in Contemporary Andhra Pradesh: Achievements, Weaknesses and Potentialities. 11. The Buckingham and Carnatic Mills Strike and the Cracks in Non-Brahmin Polity in Early Twentieth Century South India. 12. Pulaya Consciousness and Protest in Twentieth Century Travancore and Cochin. Index.

The book essentially is a collective of twelve essays, dealing with the past and contemporary experiences of the Dalits, who in most parts of India continue to be denied the basic rights and facilities of human existence. Some of the essays narrativise the perceptions of the Dalits vis-à-vis the broader issues of nationalism, nationalist politics and ‘national community’. They bring out a whole range of differing perspectives and responses on the part of the Dalit communities, which always seemed to be in a kind of a ‘double bind’. Despite being divided in terms of class and economic standing, the articulate sections of the Daliat communities could easily mobilize the ordinary sections, since both seemed to share the same sense of injustice and exploitation that had been meted out to them by the upper caste groups. In the case of colonial India, the movements of protest were often appropriated by the forces of nationalism and this possibly obliterated the prospects of an autonomous brand of Dalit politics. At the time of the Indian Independence in 1947, Dalit politics stood at an interesting phase of protest and accommodation. There were groups which favoured to align with the Indian National Congress and gain the benefits of protective discrimination, but there were some others who favoured protest in the form of peoples’ movement by aligning with more radical political groups like the communists in the expectation of eliminating the last vestiges of an old feudal order. Definitely, the essays contained herein will delight and enlighten one and all concerned.